


like you know i am better than the worst thing i ever did

by postcardmystery



Category: Leverage
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, M/M, Multi, Murder, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:09:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m goin’ to die for them,” he says to Sophie, before he ever says it to Nate, and it is not a simple statement of fact but a barebones confession, the helpless bleeding of a wound that he was too smart to not know had been made but he’d been putting pressure of for years, hoping that with spit and a prayer that he could make it heal, but he never could, isn’t sure that the stitches that could close that wound have even been invented.</p><p>“Yes,” she says, “And how long have you known that?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	like you know i am better than the worst thing i ever did

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for physical child abuse, murder, war, and violence.

i.

There is no justice in the world.

He’s six the first time he learns it, relearns it at sixteen and twenty-six, at the open maw of mines and in the tramp of his booted feet over the soil of a country far from home, in the bullet casings he never leaves at his kills and in the slow hot smile that becomes his calling card, more terrible than the look in his eyes that is the last thing so many men ever see. He relearns it with every rib of his that’s cracked beneath someone else’s boot and the ribs he cracks in repayment, the echo of revenge never taken and lies always told. He relearns it because he doesn’t know how to stop, because he doesn’t know how to unlearn it, because he’s learnt to roll with the punches because the pain never ends and because he doesn’t know how to not be a weapon, how to make his voice heard, how to be anything other than what he is, simple and streamlined and not the man he ever wanted to be but the only one he can.

The man he knows as _that asshole Ford_ calls him, and he unlearns everything he ever knew in thirteen short days and a fistbump he wasn’t expecting and the peacock flick of long blonde hair.

 

 

ii.

He did not work for Damien Moreau. 

No one worked for him, because there was no such thing as a contract, because when you signed up you signed in blood and only some of it was yours. You were already bought and paid for, long ago, the road you walked the one that led you to him and you would be gone if you could be, but you couldn’t, so you walked the road and didn’t look back, and if the whole operation was a bad country song, most of Eliot Spencer’s life had been, if he’s honest with himself, which he always is.

He knew he’d die doing it, in the service of a man who made his skin crawl, indentured without the courage to go ronin. He knew when he died, he’d deserve it, not because he’d done things that any man would be glad to take back but because even if he could take them back he wasn’t sure if he would, if it’d matter, if there was any world where he wasn’t exactly who he was, this man with blood on his hands with loyalty to no one, not even himself. Death was a promise from a Kentucky skyline, never quite a wish but never quite a hardship, the scars on his ribs from his Daddy’s boots the only contract Eliot Spencer’d ever signed and the only signature he could never cross out. 

He’d die doing this, and he knew it, until--

\--until all of sudden, he wouldn’t.

 

 

iii.

“I’m goin’ to die for them,” he tells Nate, years later, his hair hanging loose and his throat clean of the dog-tags he melted at a thousand degrees the day he left the voicemail saying he was never coming back, and Nate, damn that bastard, who always thought he understood but has always lacked Eliot’s worst capacity, that brutal honesty that’s left villages burning in his wake and the sidewalk red beneath his feet and his name a legend scored into the reptilian hindbrain of every soldier of fortune on the planet, Nate needs to say his piece because he always does, so Eliot just smiles, small and sad, when Nate opens his mouth to say--

“I’m sure they’ll thank you for that.”

Because, when it all comes down to it, he’s never really understood it at all.

 

 

iv.

Nothing has ever compared to a Kentucky sunset.

He didn’t mean to go home, finds himself driving until he’s sitting in the car he knows better than to bring somewhere as small and poor as this and trying to remember the person he was twenty years ago or more, who was only sometimes a thief when he was hungry and hadn’t yet learnt to hit back when punched. He doesn’t know the kid he used to be, isn’t even sure if he’s betrayed him, because he buried that kid when he was given his marching orders and he hasn’t searched for him in almost as long. He buried him so many times, in jungles and the Soviet Bloc and in a sniper’s sights in Los Angeles until he wouldn’t have recognised himself on the street, until, more importantly, his Daddy wouldn’t either, and kept burying him until there was nothing left, nothing but the drawl and the smile and the scars he can’t get scrub off, no matter how hard he tried.

But nothing has ever compared to a Kentucky sunset. He’d think that there was a lesson in there somewhere, if he was a learning man.

 

 

v.

“I’m goin’ to die for them,” he says to Sophie, before he ever says it to Nate, and it is not a simple statement of fact but a barebones confession, the helpless bleeding of a wound that he was too smart to not know had been made but he’d been putting pressure of for years, hoping that with spit and a prayer that he could make it heal, but he never could, isn’t sure that the stitches that could close that wound have even been invented.

“Yes,” she says, “And how long have you known that?”

He shrugs, and it’s a lie, he’s lying to a liar and he knows, she knows it, and he knows she knows, and it betrays him more than words ever could that he’s even bothering to try to lie to her at all.

“It matters to you, doesn’t it?” she says, (and he’d call that smile _kind_ , on someone else’s face, in someone else’s life, where this isn’t the most dangerous confession he’s ever made and the thing that will be the last nail in his very-literal-coffin, somewhere, someday, not that far down the line), “But it matters even more that they don’t know that, doesn’t it?”

“Y’all are the most ambiguous people I’ve ever met,” he says, and deftly sidesteps the question he doesn’t want to answer: does it matter that they don’t know he’ll die, or that they don’t know that it matters?

He’s not sure he knows, anyway. He’s very certain that it’s not the point at all.

 

 

vi.

“They shot you in the thigh,” says Parker, and he bats her hands away, rough disguised as gentle, or maybe the other way around, and says, “Yeah? So fuckin’ what?”

She doesn’t notice when his hands shake, following his eyes to the shine of the diamond in the safe and trusting that he will never die when she needs him, still. 

Which was, of course, exactly the con he was running. Which, of course, is a truth that is not a con at all.

 

 

vii.

He doesn’t watch Hardison drowning, because he needs to not watch, because he needs not to remember the man that he really is, under cheap clothes and easy smiles and the guns he never uses if he can help it. He needs to be able to lie to himself, just this once, and not look at choking gasps beneath the water. He needs to forget and never to forgive and to lie and force the man that did not make him the man that he's become believe the lies he’s peddling, because he will die for his sins, but Hardison--

\--but he’ll be more damned than he is already if Hardison does. He doesn’t believe in anything. But he believes in this.

 

 

viii.

“I’m goin' to die for them,” he hisses in Sterling’s ear, the first time he ever says it, and it’s not a confession but a threat, a promise of something Sterling cannot countenance or triumph over, cannot predict or bargain or wheedle his way out of, and as much as it’s not a confession it is one nevertheless, and he’s handed Sterling the greatest weapon anyone will ever be able to hold over him, the whisper of the only things that matter and the flickering firelight on the walls of his cave, the truth that stands behind him and makes him see the sun.

“I’m goin’ to die for them,” he says, and clicks the safety off, “And there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it, boy, ‘cept make sure it ain’t you who kills me, ‘cause you best believe that bastard’s comin’ with me to the gates of hell.”

“Yeah,” says Sterling, “But do _they_ know that?”

 

 

ix.

“You know what I want you to do,” said Damien Moreau, ten years ago or more.

He did. 

In a way, the story ends here.

(In another, exact same way, this is where it starts.)

 

 

x.

“Y’all ain’t dyin’ til I do,” he says, half snarled threat and the rest a hideously naked pink-cheeked confession, humiliating in the moment and it’s going to be even worse in the aftermath, once he comes back to himself enough to realise what he’s done. Parker throws back her head and laughs, and he follows the long line of her throat before he catches himself, before he realises that there’s nothing left on earth that can give him away more cleanly than what just came out of his mouth.

“You got a deathwish, my man,” says Hardison, which is more than a little ironic, with Parker’s harness still snug about her waist and blood caked under her fingernails from breaking down a door that didn’t want to go, and Eliot opens his mouth and realises that this wasn’t his confession, that he’s been confessing this for years, with blinding smiles and fight training and all the bruises he’s gathered, standing in between them and a beating that’d be worse on them than him.

“We’ll kiss you when we get home,” says Parker, “But for now shut up and hold onto my rope.”

The rope burns his palms and Hardison is throwing him little looks that promise so much for when they get back in the van and the wind is in his hair and Parker’s weight is glorious in his hands and the stars are scored bright across the skyline and he takes a breath--

\--and realises, for the very first time, that dying _for_ someone, and dying _with_ someone, they ain't the same thing at all.


End file.
